White Ashes Part 7

There are strewn about in a thousand niches of the city little groups of buildings which seem to have a.s.sembled themselves, by some lonesome impulse, into communities. Primarily, of course, these groupings are ethnological, these cities within a city being originally created largely by the timidity of strangers in a strange land. There are little Italys, and Chinatowns, and diminutive Bohemias, all swung together by the action of this great centripetal force of loneliness.

The buildings in these communities, inflexible enough in all conscience as regards design, contrive none the less to take on in some way a character and appearance peculiar to their inhabitants; this may be a matter only of red Turkey turbans flapping in the breeze, or perhaps of the haunting aroma of some national staple of food--but certainly it is there. Scattered through Manhattan, from the Battery to the Bronx, these five centers are witnesses as they stand to the effect of circ.u.mstance on bricks and mortar. And that there should be this visible effect is no doubt natural enough, for the difference between nation and nation is a salient thing. It would be far stranger were it to fail of effect even on so unimpressionable a thing as a six-story red-brick tenement house.

There are forces, however, which prove themselves hardly less potent than this force of fellow-nationality, but which would at first thought be denied any vital molding power over people or over things. These are the trades, and--less distinctive in their outward aspects, at least--the professions. It is not odd that a fis.h.i.+ng village or a mining camp should take on a certain character unique to itself, but surely one would not expect a lawyer to impress on his environment a stamp so unmistakable that one could say, observing it from without, "In this building lawyers plot." Superficially there would be said to be scant difference between a lawyer and a broker or a real estate dealer or an insurance man. Yet in New York City, where communities of these professions mesh and intermesh and overlap, there are still streets which are, and which could be, to a trained eye, the habitat of financiers alone, and where at once all other wayfarers are seen to be interlopers, or at best mere visitors at a fair.

Such a street is Wall Street, and such is Broad. And on the eastern rim of this same zone runs a street which, despite the countless changes that the years untiringly bring, could not possibly be mistaken for anything but what it is, the great aorta of the fire insurance world. William Street is as distinctly a fire insurance street as any street could possibly be distinctive of its profession.

Scattered along the intersecting ways, but lining William Street from Pine to Fulton, are gathered the fire insurance companies and the brokers, respectively the sellers and the buyers of insurance. There you will find the homes of the big alert New York companies whose lofty steel and granite buildings stand as fit monuments to their strength and endurance and enterprise, and the United States headquarters of the dignified but aggressive British fire offices whose risks are scattered over every portion of the earth where there is property to insure, and the metropolitan departments of the great corporations that have made the name of Hartford, Connecticut, almost symbolic of fire insurance.

There are also the agencies, in each of which from one to a dozen smaller companies have intrusted their local underwriting to some agency firm. There too are the offices of the world's leading reinsurance companies, most of them German or Russian, who accept their business not from agents or property owners, but entirely from other insurance companies. There are the elaborately equipped offices of the local inspection and rating bureau maintained by all the companies, and there are the offices of the dealers in automatic sprinklers, fire alarms, extinguishers, and hose. And throughout the whole district the buildings are honeycombed with the almost countless brokers--from firms who transact as much business as a large insurance company down to shabby men who have failed to succeed in other lines and who eke out an existence on the commissions from an account or two handed them in friends.h.i.+p or in charity--all of them the busy intermediaries between the insurers and the insured.

From morning till night these insurance men throng William Street, most of them representing the brokers who feed the business into the great machine. And it is no wonder that the street is thronged, for the amount of detail requisite for every insurance effected is surprisingly great. Let us suppose that Brown, owning a building, desires to insure it. He sends his order to Jones, a broker who has solicited the business. Jones's clerk enters up the order and makes out a slip called a binder, which is an abbreviated form of contract insuring the customer until a complete contract in the form of a policy can be issued. This binding slip is given to a clerk called the placer, whose duty it is to place the risk, or in other words to secure the acceptance of the insurance by some company or companies. The placer then goes into the street, returning when his binder is completed by the acceptance of the amount desired, the name of each company with the amount a.s.sumed and the initials of its representative being signed in the s.p.a.ces left for that purpose. Forms must then be prepared by the broker to suit the conditions of the risk and delivered to the companies, the rate schedule must be scrutinized to see whether in any way a lower rate can be obtained, and as soon as possible the policies themselves must be secured and delivered to the a.s.sured. The premium must then be collected and remitted, less the broker's commission, to the companies. And the broker's duty does not end even here. He must watch the risk for changes in occupancy, protect his client's interests in the event of a loss, and constantly fight like a tiger before the rating bureau to reduce the rate lest some alert rival offer his customer better terms.

All this detail is quite smoothly transacted, supposing the business to be in the companies' opinion desirable, but when the risk offered is what the street terms a "skate" or a "target," there is a sudden halt, and the completion of the binder becomes a more difficult matter. Then the really astute placer has a chance to demonstrate his efficiency.

It is his function to persuade with winged words his adversary, the company's local underwriter or "counterman," that the stock of cheap millinery belonging to the Slavonic gentlemen with the unfortunate record of two fires of unknown origin and two opportune failures is even more desirable--at the rate--than the large line on the substantial office building which he half exhibits, holding suggestively back. It is his duty to place all his business, not the good alone, and generally he succeeds in eventually doing so, although some binders become tattered and grimy with age and from having been handed futilely back and forth over the company counters. The owner of many a Fifth Avenue dwelling would be surprised could he know that the insurance on his property had been utilized to force on some reluctant company a small line covering the sewing machines in Meyer Les.h.i.+nsky's Pike Street sweatshop. Many an ingenious placer has had the binders of his very worst risks--that he had been totally unable to cover--freshly typewritten every morning in order to convey the impression that the order had that moment been secured by his firm and that the hesitating counterman to whom it was being presented with elaborate indifference was the first--the best friend of the placer--to whom the line had been offered.

On an eligible corner on the west side of William Street, at the very center of the Street's activity, stood, in the year 1912, a gray stone structure of dignified though scarcely decorative appearance. On the stone slabs each side of the doorway, old style bra.s.s letters proclaimed--if so modest an announcement could be termed a proclamation--that here were the offices of

THE GUARDIAN FIRE INSURANCE COMPANY OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK

Over this portal gray walls rose to the height of eight stories. Such was the headquarters, from an external aspect, of one of the oldest, safest, and best of local companies, which invariably, for brevity, was known to friends and foes alike as "The Guardian of New York."

Entering the somewhat narrow vestibule, the visitor found himself in a small and gloomy hall, confronted by two debilitated grille elevator doors which seemed sadly to need oiling, the elevators behind which carried conservatively and without precipitancy those who wished to ascend. The two individuals who directed the leisurely progress of these cars were elderly men who, like most of those in the Guardian's employment, had been in the service of the company since it moved into the "new" building. This migration had occurred about the time that torch-light parades were marching up Broadway to the rhythmic cheers for "Blaine! Blaine! James G. Blaine!" It is a melancholy truth that in a generation and a half eyes grow dim and limbs falter, but in the opinion of the Guardian's management the fact that a man was no longer as young as he had once been was no valid reason, unless he were actually incompetent, why he should not be allowed to continue doing the best he could. President Wintermuth himself had once been considerably younger, and he knew it. He called all his old employees by their first names, and unless there rose a question of fidelity, he would no sooner have thought of discharging one of them than he would have thought of going home and discharging his wife. Some of the older ones, indeed, antedated Mr. Wintermuth himself, and still regarded him with the kindly tolerance of the days when they were the _cognoscenti_, and he the neophyte, learning the ropes at their hands.

One of the oldest in tenure, but a man incurably young for all that, was James Cuyler, the head of the company's local department, in charge of all the business of the Metropolitan District, and an underwriter as well known to the fraternity as the asphalt pavement of the street.

The Guardian's local department, which occupied the entire first floor of the building, except the elevator s.p.a.ce, was a busy place from nine o'clock till five on ordinary days and from nine till one on Sat.u.r.days.

Hour after hour, day after day, year after year, Mr. Cuyler stood behind his long map counter, his genial but penetrating eye instantly a.s.sessing each man that approached, sifting with quick glance the business offered, and detecting almost automatically any trick or "joker" in that which his visitors presented. Most of the men across the counter naturally were brokers or their placing clerks, armed with binders on risks of all kinds, some good and many more bad, for the good risks are usually snapped up in large amounts by the first companies to whom they are taken, but the bad ones make their weary and often fruitless tour of the entire street. All of them, the good and bad alike, the placers commonly presented to Mr. Cuyler with a bland innocence which deceived that astute veteran not at all. The purpose of the average broker was to induce the Guardian to accept his chaff with as little wheat as he could possibly bestow, while Mr. Cuyler's, on the contrary, was to take the wheat and the wheat alone. The chaff he declined in three thousand manners, in every case fitting his refusal to the refused one, always bearing in mind that that worthy's affections must not be permanently and hopelessly alienated.

"John," he would say with a smile, "I'll write thirty-five thousand on that fireproof building for you, but I can't take that rag stock. I'd like to help you out, you understand, but I simply can't touch the cla.s.s. Two years ago I wrote an accommodation line for Billy Heilbrun--some old junk shop in Sullivan Street--and she smoked for a total loss in about a month, and I can still recall the post-mortem I had with the President."

And under cover of this painful but purely fict.i.tious incident he would whisk away the binder on the fireproof building, returning it signed with one and the same movement, and smiling a smile of chastened sorrow over his inability to a.s.sist his friend with the undesirable rag offering. Or else the office would see him lean forward impressively, and say, in a hushed whisper, across the counter: "Now, Mr. Charles Webb, you're wasted in the insurance business. If you have the cold nerve to offer me that old skate that's been turned down by every company from the Continental down to the Kickapoo Lloyds--well, you ought to be in the legislature, that's where you ought to be!"

"But here's something to go with it--to sweeten it up," the unabashed Mr. Webb would probably protest, producing another risk of equally detrimental description. Then Mr. Cuyler would turn.

"Harry," he would say, "put on your hat and take Mr. Webb back to his office. He's not himself; the heat is too much for him."

And Mr. Webb would smile--and be lost.

There are very few positions which make greater demands upon one's judgment, one's diplomacy, and one's temper than this one which Mr.

Cuyler had filled so long and so inimitably. To pick a man's pocket of all its contents, deliberately selecting those of sufficient value to retain and throwing the remainder back in his face, is a matter for fine art, for the broker must not be angered or a good connection is lost to the office.

And there are artists in both galleries. There are placers who have all the fine frenzy of a starving poet in a midnight garret, men who would make the fortune of a country hotel if they would but write for it a single testimonial advertis.e.m.e.nt, men whose flow of persuasive talk is almost hypnotic, whose victims are held just as surely as ever was Wedding Guest--and with this difference, that while that cla.s.sic personage merely turned up late to the ceremony, these charmed men listen to the siren tongue until they find themselves doing things which may very readily--if fate is unkind and the risk burns--cost them their repute and their positions as well.

When such a Pan-h.e.l.lenic meeting occurred, Mr. Cuyler rose to his highest triumphs. It was perhaps a frame celluloid goods factory in Long Island City, which some soul-compelling voice had just finished describing, accoutering the grisly thing in all the garments of verbal glory. One gathered that the Guardian's fate hung on the acceptance of this translucent risk, that it was a prize saved from the clutches of a hundred grasping compet.i.tors and brought to the counter of the Guardian like a pure white lamb to the altar of the G.o.ds. When it was all over, and nothing was wanting except Mr. Cuyler's signature to the binder--then Mr. Cuyler came into his own.

"Joe," the organ note would start--"Joe, that looks as if it might be a first-rate risk of its cla.s.s, and some folks think it's not a bad cla.s.s, too, when the hazards are properly arranged. I've always thought myself that the bad record on celluloid workers was largely accidental. And I don't see how I can turn down anything that comes from your office--I guess I'll have to help you out with a small line, anyway. Where's your binder? Wait a second, though. Let me look at that map again--I forgot my exposing lines. Well! we seem to be pretty full in that block--eighty-five, ten, twelve-five, sixteen--by Jove!

I'm afraid I'll have to pa.s.s that up, after all--I didn't think I had so much around there. Awfully sorry, old man; I'd take it for you if I could for any man in the world."

And the binder was affably pa.s.sed back over the counter. But when, as probably developed at this point, Mr. Cuyler was advised that his remarks bore convincing traces of the proximity of an active steam-radiator and that the broker knew perfectly well that the Guardian hadn't a dollar at risk within three blocks--it was then that the real contest began. Celluloid was a mighty hazardous article--was Joe aware that in New York State alone the losses had been nearly three times the premiums on the cla.s.s? Perhaps this was accidental, but it was a fact just the same. But after all, what else could one expect?

Celluloid was very much like gun-cotton--made out of practically the same const.i.tuents--and only a little less dangerous to handle. It also appeared that celluloid works all over the country had for the last year been _unusually_ disastrous to the underwriters, and that the President himself had written a letter on the subject to the various rating bureaus. Honestly, it would be more than Cuyler, with all his extreme desire to oblige, would dare do--to tell the old man that the local department had written a celluloid factory. His good friend, the caller, Mr. Cuyler felt certain, would not wish to see the venerable hairs of the Guardian's local secretary trampled into the dust by the infuriate heels of the board of directors, led by the outraged President Wintermuth himself. No, he was extremely sorry, but he simply--could not--take--the risk.

And take it he would not. Such was James Cuyler. For thirty years he had stood at the Guardian's local threshold, fidelity personified, a watch-dog extraordinary that could not have been duplicated in all watchdogdom. He had but one superst.i.tion and but one grievance.

His superst.i.tion was that he would not allow a customer to enter the office after the clock struck the first blow of five. At that moment, if no employee was at hand, he himself would step out from behind the counter, close the door, and turn the key in the lock. And the best friend of the office could not have gained admission once the key was turned.

"Why do I do it?" he would say. "My boy, at about half-past five P.M.

on June fourteenth, eighteen eighty-nine, I was alone in the office, and Herman White, who used to be placer for Schmidt and Sulzbacher, came in with a ten thousand dollar line on coffee in one of those Brooklyn sh.o.r.efront warehouses. I guess all the other offices must have shut up, for Herman never gave me anything he didn't have to. He banged on the door, and I let him in, and the risk was all right and we were wide open, and I took his ten thousand. . . . And about twenty minutes later, as I stood on the front deck of the Wall Street ferryboat crossing the river, the flames burst out of the roof of that warehouse, and we paid nine thousand two hundred and thirty-seven dollars for that coffee. . . . This office closes at five P.M."

This was his superst.i.tion, and he lived up to it with absolute consistency. His one grievance was not quite so deep, which probably explained his lesser insistence upon it. This grievance was simply that the conservative policy of the company would not let him accept more than a fraction of what he would have wished to write on the island of Manhattan. Like all men who constantly live in the presence of a peril and grow thus to minimize it, Mr. Cuyler had grown to think and to feel that New York, _his_ New York, could never have a serious, sweeping fire, a conflagration. This being so, and the local business being profitable, to write so small an amount in the city was equivalent to throwing money sinfully away. Why, companies not half so large were doing double the Guardian's business, and with golden results. But only at long intervals did he permit himself the luxury of articulately bemoaning his fate, for in spite of his own conviction he felt that any implied criticism of his chief was disloyal.

Occasionally, however, his feelings would overcome him, and then he would burst forth into a hurricane of lamentations.

"The finest town in the country," he would say; "and look at what we write! I could double our income in a week if the old man would let me. But he won't. He keeps talking 'conflagration hazard' and 'keep your lines down in the dry goods district' and 'aggregate liability,'

and I can't get him to loosen up a particle. He always says we have enough at risk now. Enough at risk! Look at what the company writes in Boston! Why, the Guardian must have half as much at risk in the congested district of Boston as I write here! And Boston! Of all towns in the world!"

Mr. Cuyler was not a Bostonian.

It was perfectly true; Mr. Wintermuth was not a strictly consistent underwriter, and perhaps some day he would adopt Mr. Cuyler's viewpoint. And then, the flood-gates open, the local secretary would come into his metropolitan own. Certainly, if the Guardian's line in Boston was safe, its liability in New York was small indeed. But the Boston business had always shown a profit, and James Wintermuth and Silas Osgood had grown up together in the insurance world; and so for the present the Boston line would stand. And it was impossible to satisfy Mr. Cuyler,--he was continually moaning about the restrictions under which he labored,--and so it was likely that nothing would be done in New York, either. James Wintermuth was a conservative man.

One could have told it at his first glance about the President's office, on the top floor of the Guardian building. In the first place, the office, although it was located in the sunniest corner of the building, preserved nevertheless a kind of cathedral gloom. Dark shades in the windows reduced the light across Mr. Wintermuth's obsolete roll-top desk to never more than that of a dull afternoon. No impertinent rays of the sun could further fade the faded rug which clothed the center of the room. On the wall hung likenesses of the former heads of the company, now long since in their graves. Over the desk was an old print of the Lisbon earthquake; the germaneness of this did not at once appear,--in fact, it never appeared,--but the picture had always hung there, and in Mr. Wintermuth's opinion that was ample cause and justification.

Only in the corner, almost out of sight behind the desk, was the room's single absolute incongruity. There the surprised visitor saw, reposing quietly in its shadowy retreat, a hundred pound dumb-bell. This was the President's sole remaining animal joy, the presence of this dumb-bell. He rarely touched it now, although the colored janitor's a.s.sistant scrupulously dusted it each morning, but it was an agreeable reminder of the days when the old lion was young and when his teeth, metaphorically speaking, were new and sharp. For years it had been his custom to lift this ponderous object three times above his head before opening his mail in the morning--and he would never hire a field man or inspector who could not do likewise.

Now, of course, these trials of strength were over for Mr.

Wintermuth--and what he no longer did himself he asked none other to do. But there the relic lay, a substantial memorial of Spring in the veins. Once in a while, at long intervals, Smith, in whom the old man had a sort of shamefaced pride, would eye the thing respectfully.

"Put it up, Richard," Mr. Wintermuth would direct; "I used to do it every morning for twenty years." And Smith--with considerable effort--would put it up.

"I'd never have let you go to work for the Guardian, when you came and struck me for a position, if you hadn't been able to do that, my boy,"

said the President, reflectively.

And Smith would listen patiently to the oft-told tale. He was sincerely fond of the old autocrat, and able to bear with his growing acerbity better than he could have done had he not known the real spirit of the man. During the past year or two it seemed to Smith that his chief was showing his age more plainly than ever before. He was still under sixty-five, but he was coming to live more than ever in the past, and was growing more and more impervious to the new ideas and new methods which modern conditions constantly brought.

"The greatest trouble with the old man is," as Cuyler was heard to say on one occasion, "he has the 4 per cent bond habit."

It was perfectly, true. What was safe and what was sure appealed more strongly to James Wintermuth with the pa.s.sage of every year. Not for him were the daring methods of those companies who employed their resources in tremendous plunges in and out of the stock market, not for him the long chances in which most of his compet.i.tors gloried. The Guardian was doing well enough. Its capital of $750,000 was ample; its surplus of $500,000 very respectable; its premium income of a million and three quarters perfectly adequate, in Mr. Wintermuth's opinion.

And the stockholders, receiving dividends of 12 per cent per annum, lean years and fat alike, never audibly complained.

In appearance the Guardian's President upheld the best traditions of the old school from which he sprang. Above middle height, his erect figure gave him still much the air of a cavalier. His acute black eyes and trim white mustache made him certain to attract notice wherever he went--a fact of which he was not wholly unconscious. Even now, when gradually, almost imperceptibly, the springiness was fading from his step, he seemed a strong and virile man. His directors, most of them his contemporaries and whose insurance knowledge was limited to what they had learned on the Guardian directorate, trusted and believed in him with absolute implicitness. Any act on behalf of the company, when done by the President, they promptly ratified; and indeed they had for many years made it palpable to the meanest intelligence that they considered James Wintermuth the head, brain, heart, and all the other vital organs of the company which they--nominally--directed. In short, James Wintermuth _was_ the Guardian.

There was in all the Street one man alone who would have taken exception to this a.n.a.lysis--and he kept his opinion securely locked in his secretive, his very secretive brain. This man was F. Mills O'Connor, Vice-President of the Guardian.

CHAPTER V

"Turn up Providence Two," said Mr. O'Connor. As the gentleman in question appeared at his office door en route to the map desk, his asperity of manner seemed to Herbert, the map clerk, even more p.r.o.nounced than usual, and his voice was fully accordant. It was never a dulcet organ, at best; but its owner rarely felt that his business transactions could be a.s.sisted by the employment of flute notes; when he did, he sank his tones to a confidential whisper intended to flatter and impress his auditor, and it usually seemed to serve the purpose.

But with his map clerks and his subordinates generally he gave free play to his natural raucousness, and he probably acted upon excellent judgment.

Herbert, whose eye and ear from long practice had grown to detect the exact degree of urgency in every call, with the agility of his Darwinian ancestry quickened by his native wit, dashed over to the desk under which the Rhode Island maps reposed. He swung the big gray-bound volume up onto the broad, flat counter with all the skill of a successful vaudeville artist, and none too soon, for he who had demanded it was at his elbow.